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Gloria Naylor's Fiction Gloria Naylor’s Fiction Gloria Naylor’s Fiction: Contemporary Explorations of Class and Capitalism Edited by Sharon A. Lewis and Ama S. Wattley Gloria Naylor’s Fiction: Contemporary Explorations of Class and Capitalism Edited by Sharon A. Lewis and Ama S. Wattley This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Sharon A. Lewis, Ama S. Wattley and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9591-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9591-0 In Memoriam Gloria Naylor 1950-2016 and for Sharon’s parents, Catherine and Arthur Anderson TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Sharon A. Lewis and Ama S. Wattley Chapter One ............................................................................................... 23 I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place Anita August Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 45 Keep your Check: Commodity, Capitalism and Commerce in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day Shamika Ann Mitchell Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61 Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café: Selling Sex in the Cultural Marketplace Maxine Montgomery Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 77 In the Shadow of Cosby: Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills and the Postintegration Black Elite Terrence Tucker Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 101 The Price of Identity in Linden Hills Sharese Willis Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 115 The Economics of Identity in The Men of Brewster Place Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Contributors ............................................................................................. 131 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sharon and Ama would like to thank the contributors to this volume. Our book would not have come to fruition without your excellent essays. We appreciate your patience from the inception to the completion of our book. We enjoyed working with all of you. We would also like to thank our professors at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, who laid the foundation for our envisioning the work; our colleagues at Montclair State University and Pace University, respectively, for their inspiration; and our families for their love and support. A special thanks to James E. Jones, Jr., Esq., who read the publishing contracts and to Heather Russell, Leslie Wilson, Robert Whitney, Priscilla Gibson and Maki Isaka for the invaluable advice and assistance they provided on our undertaking. INTRODUCTION SHARON A. LEWIS AND AMA S. WATTLEY The politics of class is the deepest, largest challenge. (bell hooks 116) Across her collection of five novels, Gloria Naylor requires her readers to painstakingly contemplate African Americans’ relationship to social class, economics and capitalism. By no means is Naylor the first or only Black American female writer to do so. Her contemporaries, Toni Morrison, Andrea Lee and Paule Marshall, for example, published fiction representing African Americans, across regional and historical settings, and their involvement in a corporate capitalist nation. Moreover, in 1993, Michelle Cliff, introduced the literary establishment to 19th century African American entrepreneur, Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was “no stranger to capital, respectful of it…as if born to the making of money…careful, knowing that commerce was not considered her concern… . She began her empire building by embodying Mammydom… taking care of guests in her hotel, washing their linen in her laundries, satisfying them in her restaurants” [emphasis ours] (Free Enterprise 105). The title of Naylor’s novel, Bailey’s Café, echoes the title of Michelle Cliff’s novel, Free Enterprise. While Naylor’s title expresses an individually owned, for- profit business (although the Café is a magical place, and Bailey is the nominal owner/cook), in particular, Cliff’s title signals commercial, unregulated competition. “Competition” links these two economic systems. Referencing the Free Enterprise quote above, we call attention to the italicized “her” with its connotations of ownership: Pleasant’s hotel, laundries, and restaurants linked in capitalistic commerce with Bailey’s Café and neighboring Eve’s Place. African American Studies and feminist scholar Barbara Christian supports our thinking about the healthy number of recent African American women novelists who are attentive to race in connection with class, capitalism and economics. Christian reminds us that “Naylor’s novels have been preceded . by an increasing concern among these writers, Morrison in Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1980), Paule 2 Introduction Marshall in Praisesong for the Widow (1982), Andrea Lee in Sarah Phillips (1984) and Ntozake Shange in Betsey Browne [1985] on the issue of a distinct Afro American middle class and on the implications of such a dimension in the Afro-American worldview” (107-108). Readers of Naylor’s works by necessity grasp the multiple ways in which her fiction manifests the theme of capitalism, class and economics. It isn’t so much that this theme is more prevalent in Naylor’s work than in other African American literature. Rather, Naylor either integrates or foregrounds the motif of economics, class, and capitalism in a more complex, intricate way. Her novels explore not just one social class but the place (regional and/or psychic) where different classes converge, are antagonistic, or wherein her characters over a lifetime experience more than one social class. As Charles Rowell indicates in his interview with Naylor, she has “allow[ed] the whole spectrum of socio-economic classes to appear in African-American literature” (183), just as she herself, growing up, moved within several different classes.1 We believe that the Black American community is no less diverse than the nation in which it resides. As Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Makeda Silvera, to name a few, remind us in their non-fictional and fictional works, respectively, African Americans are a community marked by both sameness and difference, this latter across, at least, ability, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, religion, and, for our purposes here, social class. That is to say, the community is marked by divergent and often competing experiences and voices. We, the editors of this volume, decided to write this book for four reasons. First, we are convinced that social class and capitalism remain delicate, often power-keg and habitually circumvented topics of conversation, matters about which most people in the United States are mis- and/or uninformed. For some, the mere mention of social class hints at a lack of decorum. Discussions about social class across social class resonate with the taboo of discussing race across race. Studies evidence that the privileged Others frequently experience shame and/or anxiety for the advantages of their race and class status. For the United States, a putatively democratic nation, the existence of a hegemonic order of power and privilege rings oxymoronic. Not only does a class system in connection with equality and social justice seem contradictory, but discourse about capitalism often cultivates charges of anti-capitalism. How, one queries, is it possible to negotiate extremes of wealth and poverty in a society institutionally underpinned by ideologies of cultural- economic equality? Social class, like race, and the economic system of capitalism are highly sensitive, generally off-limits dialogic topics. This Gloria Naylor’s Fiction 3 volume and Naylor, herself, raise awareness of that otherwise dismissed or oversimplified component of economics within a nation marked by intersecting oppressions. Second, a refusal to concede the multifaceted existences of Black life in the United States reinforces and perpetuates stereotypes and leaves false and inadequate images of African American reality. Third, unlike her literary foremothers, for example, Jessie Fauset, Dorothy West and Nella Larsen who captured the Black American middle and upper class life as marked by skin-color or complexion politics and/or embattled with racism, exclusively, Naylor proffers a more developed analysis of the Black middle class by situating her characters within a corporate/capitalist/for- profit economic framework. Finally, Naylor’s fiction, in interweaving portraits of race, social class, economics, and capitalism fiercely rejects mainstream, popular, cross-race representations of African Americans. Among academics, it is common knowledge that subjectivities cannot be studied in isolation. Therefore, this volume spotlights one subjectivity, social class, interwoven with race and gender, and theorizes the affiliation between
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